Archives for 2015

From Robin Black’s mouth to God’s ears. And even more true, if possible, about composers.

UPDATE: Allow me to amplify a little. The idea of helping young artists is an attractive one (I’ve done a lot of it myself via publicity and enjoyed doing so), and I eagerly concede Dave Seidel’s point below about the young being at a disadvantage in this economy. It’s not that I desperately need or desire the occasional $3000 cash prize. The issue is that prizes given to young composers often confer upon them a visibility that then tends to follow their careers whether they live up to their early promise or not – let alone the fact that the young composers who win them more often tend to be deft imitators than originals. And so if a composer reaches 35 or 40 without such validations, there are few possibilities to make up that advantage any other way, until finally in your 60s – if you’ve persevered – you get “discovered” by rebellious youngsters. There is no sane reason that the institutional mechanisms by which a composer can become noticed disappear before one is forty. The sentence of Robin Black’s that I identified most with (in fact I’ve written one almost identical) is her response to the MacArthur Foundation:

“I am honored to be asked and will be honored to serve — though I’ll say, as a writer who was too old while emerging for the many ‘under 40’ and ‘under 35’ awards for emerging writers, it’s practically against my religion to shift my gaze from the over-40 set.”

I tell such organizations that there are far too many brilliant composers of my generation who’ve never received their due, and too many thirty-somethings with stellar careers, for me to look around for young composers to recommend. Any young composer offended by this will someday be a middle-aged composer, and may come to appreciate the sentiment.

I had a great time working on my piece Hudson Spiral (2010) last week with the Sirius Quartet, whose career I’d followed from their beginnings – although three of the four players are new since I left the Voice in 2005. It was a rare experience to walk into rehearsal and find performers completely understanding the piece, no explanation necessary, including my totalist dotted-eighth/triplet-quarter rhythms. The performance at Symphony Space last week went great. Here’s the recording. The piece is a canon at the major sixth, one of my spiral canon series. Thanks to Victoria Bond for including me on a great program.

And to bring them together at last, here’s its companion piece Concord Spiral, a canon at the minor seventh, written at the same time and played by the West End Quartet.

There was a clever joke to be made there, but I’m too foggy to come up with it. The minimalism conference being held in Finland in September has extended its deadline for paper proposals to April 15. Just follow this link, scroll down, and there’s a very convenient online submission form. I submitted a précis for my upcoming paper “Elodie Lauten as Minimalist Improviser.” Wish she were still around to enjoy it.

David Garland interviews my son’s black metal band Liturgy on Spinning on Air. At the end, all the band members say hello to their moms, over the radio. That’s Bernard, second from left.

Only one student in my theory class today recognized the song “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” and I had to sing it to jog his memory. There is no hope.

UPDATE, 3.28.15: Sometimes I feel impelled to resolve to no longer attempt to make jokes in this space, but if I ever come to that point, there will truly be no hope indeed. I can provide more context for the above remark for people who might want it. My students often surprise me with what they know. I would be neither disappointed nor dismayed if they were unfamiliar with Oklahoma or The Music Man, but in fact their knowledge of old musicals is often broader than mine – I suppose, because people my age keep directing such musicals at their high schools. They know West Side Story as well as I do. Gilbert and Sullivan, a cultural reference far older than the Marx Brothers, is on their radar. Their familiarity with barbershop quartet exceeds what I had at their age. And they certainly know who the Marx Brothers are, which makes it the more surprising that they haven’t seen the movies. When I was in high school all my friends quoted, and sang songs from, the Marx Brothers, and I didn’t get to see the movies until I was in college – but then, the VHS and DVD had not yet been invented, so they were not available on demand. Now putting “Marx Brothers” into YouTube gives me 57,300 results, and since my students seem to spend hours a day on YouTube, I find it inexplicable that they haven’t looked up such a still-relevant cultural touchstone. Nevertheless, I do not really think that their unfamiliarity with “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” is actually the crisis in education today. The crisis in education is its underfunding by a corrupt government. I hope this resolves any ambiguity.

In the next month I have five performances of my music coming up, three of them in New York City. On this coming Sunday, March 22, James Bagwell will conduct the Dessoff Choirs in three movements of my Transcendental Sonnets, 7 PM at Peter Norton at Symphony Space in New York.

On Wednesday, April 8, students of Dawn Upshaw’s will premiere my song cycle Your Staccato Ways (on poems of Karen Schoemer) at Bard College’s Bito Auditorium, at 8 PM. That’s a preview performance for the real premiere the following Sunday, April 12 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Ave. in New York, 4 in the afternoon.

On April 13, the Sirius String Quartet will premiere my Hudson Spiral on the Cutting Edge Concerts curated by Victoria Bond, 7:30 PM at Symphony Space.

And finally (or hopefully not finally), Relache is playing some of my Planets (Venus, Moon, Pluto) at Dickinson College at 7 PM on April 18.

My subject heading is from Jung. Today we went to our usual Saturday breakfast diner. Our favorite table by the window was being vacated, a young guy still sitting there. Nancy brought to my attention that the book in front of him was Music Downtown. This had never happened to me, and I couldn’t resist: “Is that a good book?,” I asked, ready to slink away quietly if he replied “Not really.” “Yeah, it’s really good!” “I wrote it,” I replied. “Really?” He looked like I had to be joking. His breakfast partner, who turned out to be his uncle and a record producer, returned, and said he had just given the book to his nephew. His nephew was a student percussionist in Pittsburgh, where I had been last weekend, and we commiserated about the awful weather. The nephew grew up in Dallas, as I did. We quickly ascertained that his parents live in the same small North Texas city as my mother, and that they go every week to the same breakfast place where my mother and brother go. After that I was afraid to press for further details.

Below is the paper I delivered Saturday at the University of Pittsburgh’s microtonality conference. I altered the title from the original “How the 13th Harmonic Saved my Sorry Ass.” I think my approach to microtonality is rather unusual, and the conference offered little counter-evidence. I feel like most composers use microtones to add an extra layer of complexity, or just to create an exotic out-of-tuneness, and sometimes (especially Europeans) deploy the harmonic series as little more than a background structuring device. I’m looking for a new level of musical syntax in the upper harmonics; it excites me to learn that the 11th harmonic of a tonic chord can resolve to the perfect fifth of the 15th harmonic, 11/8 at 551¢ sliding to 45/32 at 590¢. I sit around and wonder if the 13th harmonic of the 11th harmonic (or vice versa) can make a convincing resolution to the fifth scale degree of the dominant (143/128 to 144/128, or 191¢ to 204¢) – and is that movement reversible? I’m thinking all this can create a new level of tonality for a new common practice period, but only if we collectively internalize the different qualities of various interval types, which presumes a musical context in which they can be clearly heard.

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How the 13th Harmonic Ameliorated my Hitherto Not-Entirely-Satisfactory Existence
by Kyle Gann

I have always said that I’ve never found two microtonalists who have the same reason for using microtones, or who use the same method for composing with them. This diversity is a blessing. It is also, admittedly, an inconvenience: if we could all agree on some kind of system, some one notation, it would undoubtedly speed up some kind of microtonal performance practice. But since, of course, we will never come to any consensus about what kind we want, and for now I find myself committed to the boundless frontier of unfenced microtonality.

I do, however, have strong and, to me, philosophically and musically compelling reasons for choosing the microtonal path I’ve taken, and, not being the kind of liberal that Robert Frost described as being “too open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel,” I thought, today, that I would propose my own approach to just intonation as a kind of model. It is not unique to me, and to some extent I inherited it from my teacher Ben Johnston, but I think I have pursued it more single-mindedly than he did. I have achieved less than Ben partly because he was such a brilliant conceptualizer, and partly because he did many things, whereas in my work as a microtonalist I have kept trying to do one thing, and to see where it leads. What I did inherit from Ben, and I think it is implicit in his microtonal notation (in which I’ve been writing for more than three decades now), is a sense that the future of music lies in going back to the early 17th century at the point at which Europe closed off the possibilities of the harmonic series, and in certain respects beginning again from that point. Our common practice harmony is based on what were originally five-limit intervals, particularly the 3/2 perfect fifth, the 5/4 major third, and the 6/5 minor third. By building new triads on members of previous triads we can evolve a large gamut of tones and elicit a wide range of harmonies within a limited pitch space:

 

I will now put up a progression that expands from triads to seventh chords, linking them via pivot tones in a manner typical of Brahms, though here carried to perhaps an unusual length:

 

If we tune the sevenths of these chords to the seventh harmonic, we get a vast expansion in the range of intervals available and the subtlety of chromatic nuance. This next chart is the exact same chord progression renotated in Ben Johnston’s notation, with seventh harmonics marked by sevens and seventh subharmonics by upside-down sevens:

 

The numbers tell the distance from C in cents. You can see that the top line offers seven different pitches in the narrow minor third from 814 cents to 1088 cents, with six of those in less than a whole-step: 814, 884, 899, 933, 969, 1003, and 1088. Likewise, the tenor line uses seven pitches in less than a minor third, and aside from the C, the bass line has five pitches within a space smaller than a whole step. And yet this chord progression is built up in a perfectly conventional way found frequently in late Romantic music, only with the tuning limit raised from five to seven. It requires 25 pitches to correctly tune this sequence of ten seven-limit chords.

From the beginning it seemed to me that if we could learn to apprehend relations between these complexly related chords based on the 3rd, 5th, and 7th harmonics, then we must be able to further hear such relations based on higher harmonics. This became my approach to microtonality: that one could climb further up the overtone ladder to the seventh and eleventh harmonics while pivoting between chords in the same way European composers have always done in the triadic system. I have often joked that I became a microtonalist because I liked Max Reger’s music but didn’t find it chromatic enough. What was crucial for me was to become able to hear these new intervals in my inner ear and compose with them intuitively – I was never content to impose a structural or mathematical system on music that I couldn’t feel. And it seemed to me that the way to internalize them was to use them in the same kind of context that I had learned the traditional intervals as a child. I knew how to hear a movement from a tonic to a major submediant (the fifth harmonic), and I thought that with training I could come to hear one triad moving to another based on the eleventh harmonic.

At the same time, microtonality offered me a bridge over which I could glide back and forth between Romanticism and minimalism and bypass modernism altogether. Why bypass modernism? Because I had begun to feel trapped in an aesthetic based equally on endless novelty and ascetic prohibition. I’ve always thought the composer George Rochberg characterized this accurately: the progressing history of music was always inclusive and cumulative, each era receiving what was valuable from the previous one and building on it – until the mid-20th century, in which composers decided to exclude and prohibit aspects of the musical practice associated with the past. It became forbidden to do all the wonderful things in music that we already knew how to do, and a composer constantly walked on eggshells trying to avoid reminding a listener of any previous music. Rochberg felt that this negative new attitude was a collective neurosis, and a sure road map to oblivion, that a prohibitionary approach to composing would inevitably become a dessicated practice that would blow away with the first wind. By contrast, to add new harmonics to the musical practice we already had allowed me to bring the past along with me, and I felt that the more my compositional technique was rooted in the past, the more securely it would stand in the future. I always liked Partch’s statement, “Let no year pass that I do not step one significant century backward.”

And so I moved up to the eleventh harmonic. I’ve always had more affinity for Renaissance counterpoint than Baroque counterpoint, in addition to which I felt that until we learn how this new harmonic world operates a Renaissance approach was the safer route. And so my criteria were relentlessly contrapuntal, based in voice-leading criteria rather than root movement. I’m going to play an excerpt from my 2005 chamber piece The Day Revisited, in which I spiraled through a collection of eight harmonic series’. The criterion for ordering them were to base them on some line of counterpoint within the chords ascending through the smallest possible intervals, and within that chord progression I would write melodies fixating within a small, static region. In other words, he chords would gradually ascend, but the melodies would stay as fixed in register as possible, so that the melody note’s place in the current harmonic series would keep changing, as happens in good conventional counterpoint. Here the piano plays among eight notes bounded by a small minor third, occasionally leaping upward by a third in the harmony:

 

One will note that in this case the triadic and seventh-chord harmonies are fairly conventional in themselves, the exotic element being the contrapuntal voice-leading between chords. I wanted the audience to learn to feel these tiny intervals, to literally go out humming them (in the way that Ives predicted a coming century in which schoolchildren would whistle tunes in quarter-tones), but to be understood, it was crucial that they be harmonically supported – and, at the beginning, by chords that in themselves were already familiar.

From 1984 to 2004, I contented myself with the eleventh harmonic. Part of this was out of allegiance to papa Harry Partch, who had not only gotten along fine but done wonders within eleven-limit tuning. As he wrote in Genesis of a Music, though,

…[T]he reason for resting at the limit of 11 is a purely personal and arbitrary one. When a hungry man has a large table of aromatic and unusual viands spread before him he is unlikely to go tramping along the seashore and in the woods for still other exotic fare. And however skeptical he is of the many warnings regarding the unwholesomeness of his fare… he has no desire to provoke further alarums. [Genesis of a Music, p. 123]

The other reason for stopping where Harry and I had stopped was that I had far more trouble learning to hear and anticipate the 13th harmonic than I had the 7th and 11th. But the problem I kept coming across, measure by measure, in The Day Revisited and other pieces was that within any one tonality I could use whole steps from which I could almost always find a pitch in the next chord less than a half-step away – except where I encountered a gap of 267¢ in my scale between the 12th and 14th harmonics:

In addition to Ben Johnston’s pitch notation for the 7th and 11th harmonic I have also added some of my own verbal notation to document the kinds of comments I typically made upon encountering this interval in counterpoint.

So I had considerable incentive to fill in that gap with the 13th harmonic, and I started to train my ear by writing a simple piece hammering away at the 13th harmonic over a drone, Triskaidekaphonia of 2005. For this piece I employed a simple scale concept of using all 29 intervals formed by the ratios of the numbers one through 13. This also gave me a range of scales moving from the satisfyingly exotic (a tridecimal tuning of 13/12, 13/11, 13/10 and so on in the top line) to a normal-sounding major scale of 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, as you can hear at the end of this one-minute excerpt (Aron Kallay, pianist):

 

With these intervals better established in my ears I added in 13-related intervals to the kind of harmonic scheme I’d been using.

With my harmonic scale spread more evenly across the octave I began writing pieces pivoting between the harmonics up to the 13th, the 15th, and occasionally a fake 17th harmonic on 15/14, being slightly more exotic than the real 17th harmonic. (The 15/14 root also provided a link to Henry Cowell, the only writer to use this ratio for the just half-step.) One such piece, particularly paradigmatic in my output, is The Unnameable of 2012. In this piece the keyboard solo disappears into the wall of overtones, somewhat like a person walking into a lake, exploring the bottom of it, and then emerging again. Through the bulk of the work the voice-leading approaches immobility. The subjective element is embodied by a motive of a major second – although the major second can variably be 231, 204, 183, 165, or 151 cents in size. It comes to seem like a leap compared to the tiny increments of the contrapuntal background, and yet at every point the motive clarifies the melody’s position in the harmonic series of the moment.

I’ll play the beginning of the work:

 

and then I’m going to skip to the densest moment, in which the sense of melodic phrase disappears for a kind of very low-key climax, a climax not of dynamics or texture or register, but merely of harmonic rhythm and disorientation. In this excerpt you can see that the bass notes start on the tonic Bb, then move to the 9th harmonic on C+, the 11th harmonic on E^b, the 13th harmonic on C13b, the 7th harmonic on A7b+, and so on. Melodic movement in the upper parts is as minimal as possible, a kind of virtuoso exhibition of parsimonious voice-leading.

 

We look next at the different lines in terms of cents above the tonic Bb. The underlined numbers indicate the root of each harmonic series. In the bottom part of the chart, the numbers between lines indicate the pitch movement in cents, showing intervals of 3, 12, 17, 27, 32, with rarely more than 85 cents in the upper voices.

Conceptually, this is no different from the conventional triadic chord progression I played as my first example, except that in addition to the 1st, 3rd, and 5th harmonics I’ve also added in the 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and occasionally 15th, using them similarly as pivot notes to swing to related harmonic areas step by step.

(In the past ten years I’ve found myself more and more fascinated by barbershop quartet music. Because when you consider it compositionally, barbershop quartet consists of an attempt to keep the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th harmonics continually in play within a two-octave range, shifting fundamentals according to pivot tones, and triggering the sequence of chords by running a melody through it. It hardly matters what the melody is, because the chord sequences come out pretty much the same regardless. What I’ve demonstrated above is a kind of 13-limit barbershop sextet, complete with melody in the alto. All it needs is for me to write some snappy lyrics for it, buy some boaters and canes, and hit the Appalachian circuit.)

I’m going to play one last example, which is a little tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote in preparation for a much larger piece that I was unable to complete for this conference. The piece is one of a series of little tuning studies I titled Nursery Tunes for Demented Children. This uses an eight by eight grid of harmonics numbers 1 through 15 built on the odd numbered harmonics 1 through 15, a tuning system that I am not the first to use. The most ambitious piece I’ve completed in this tuning is Romance Postmoderne, which you will hear on the concert, and much of what I say here will apply to that piece as well. The purpose of the little piece is to demonstrate levels of dissonance and consonance arrived at by simply moving among different triads in the harmonic series. It starts off with triads of 7:9:11 and 10:13:15, replacing them little by little with minor triads of 10:12:15 and major triads of 4:5:6. Once the triads are all major, they begin accruing upper harmonics until each eight-note harmonic series is being played at once. Then notes begin being shed from the top again until we end up with a conventional I6/4-V7 cadence which closes deceptively on a chord on the 13th harmonic. I think of this little piece as partial proof of what I call Henry Cowell’s Theory of Relativity, his principle as stated in New Musical Resources that

the points in the [harmonic] series… where consonance leaves off and dissonance begins, are not rigidly fixed… but depend on the ear of the individual listener, who is in turn influenced by the musical age in which he lives… acoustically speaking, there is no point at which any other than an arbitrary difference between them can be shown, which establishes the relativity of consonance, dissonance, and discord. [pp. 10-11]

 

Optimism is not characteristic of the times we find ourselves living in, but if it were not for our political situation, I would find boundless optimism for music in the steps of the harmonic series we have not yet assimilated into our music. I have begun learning to hear how chord progressions pivoting on the 11th and 13th harmonics work, but I am a long way from arriving at any kind of idiom or composing habits ready to replace our common practice tonality. Nor have I yet figured out how to work effectively with 7:9:11 and 10:13:15 triads, and so I feel like I might as well be composing in 1605, overwhelmed with possibilities of a vast new language. I also think that in a sense we are closer to the beginning of music’s history than its potential end, and that the materials we know about but haven’t yet learned how to use effectively could provide enough material for several more centuries of exciting development. And until some totally new direction suggests itself to us, I think that the long past of music, in which we’re all so well trained, provides the best available guide to our future.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The day following my paper, Vicky Ray and Aron Kallay (pictured below) gave the world premiere of my Romance Postmoderne (the linked recording is my realization, not their performance). It’s about the piece that most clearly illustrates the principles stated above.

 

I had my most fun day at school ever yesterday. The reason will be arcane to explain. As chair of the arts division, I am on the executive committee, and currently chairing that as well. Last week we made an administrative decision to restrict the divisional listserv for official announcements by the division chair, after a two-year experiment in having it unmoderated, which latter privilege had never been announced and was little used, as far as I know. Anyway, the first non-chair professor to attempt to use the divisional listserv raised a hue and cry and accused the administration of censoring our attempts to send messages to other faculty. The dean called me and ordered me, as committee chair, to put out a message to the faculty posthaste. I did, politely, explaining that it was a return to the previous status quo, made due to a few complaints about faculty abuse, and that a faculty committee had made the change without administration involvement.

Well, we have a few paranoid faculty members, and some bad blood from previous power struggles, and quite a few eyes fell on me. Who were these faculty members who had complained? Why did they have privileged status, and why was I shielding them? What I had called “moderation” of the listserv (I had never used the word) was nothing more than censorship. Why had the committee made this change without widespread faculty discussion? What were we trying to hide? Aside from one polite response to the ringleader I kept my mouth shut, knowing that once it became clear what an insignificant change this was (back to the system we’d used without complaint until 2013) the people attacking me were going to feel awfully foolish, and that I would only compound their embarrassment by needlessly defending myself. And sure enough, once the details were explained at the afternoon’s division meetings, the issue died down and today had vanished from faculty discourse.

But for a few hours I saw myself portrayed in the popular imagination as the kind of nefarious, Machiavellian schemer I only wish I could be in real life – and also was defended by others who don’t know me, but who saw me as an innocent victim of sectarian faculty paranoia. It was an awful lot of heated attention for someone who keeps as low a profile on campus as I do. And it demonstrated how easily the quotidian motivations behind an action can be vastly misinterpreted from the vantage point of an environment rife with long-standing political tensions. This, multiplied by thousands, is what happens in our political discourse every day, but one rarely sees it happen up close.

Students are inscrutable. I’ve taken over first-year theory again this semester, as a favor to a younger colleague. So far I’ve brought in, as examples for musical analysis, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”; Tom Lehrer’s “Bright College Days”; two ragtimes by Scott Joplin; two barbershop quartet songs, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Lida Rose” from The Music Man; “Yesterday” by the Beatles (unrecognized by half my class); and the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” The other day a songwriting guitarist kid came to drop the class. His reason: “I’m not sure this classical theory track is the right one for me.”

I’ll contextualize. I don’t teach modulation until March, and nearly all classical music modulates, while in ragtime and barbershop I can get a dense wealth of varied harmonic functions without having to worry about changing key. Plus, classical music is so varied in its techniques that I used to spend a lot of time cherry-picking my examples to find pieces with which to teach a certain principle. Contrariwise, if I want to teach common-tone diminished sevenths, almost any ragtime will do; if I want secondary dominants around the circle of fifths, any barbershop quartet will do. If I need further examples, I just turn to the next page. When I teach pivot-chord modulation I’ll turn to Schubert and Schumann, though even there, mid-century Broadway tunes offer wonderful modulation paradigms within a three-page song, and West Side Story gives me both those and a lot of imaginative uses of the French sixth chord. Besides, the complexities of these chords from “Lida Rose” already had the students pretty distraught:

Brahms would have been easier. I don’t mind letting it viscerally sink in that they would need to develop a stricter range of technical skills to pursue a career in Broadway music or film scoring than to hang out a shingle as some anarchic avant-garde composer. They need some respect for the amount of expertise even a supposedly “fun” musical career will demand of them.

I’m a classical music nerd, and when I was a young snob I probably bought into some foolishness about the inviolable line between high and low art. But I studied aesthetics in college, I worked as a music critic, I’ve analyzed a ton of music, and I never tripped over that line; nothing ever went “click” when I crossed it. It is, at the very least, pedagogically irrelevant. I’ll take my chords wherever I can find them rich and juicy and in vast quantities. (And still the students think I’m some highbrow classical martinet.)

UPDATE: Further evidence: I have a smart young woman doing a senior project on rap. I’ve never heard any of the names she mentions. In a meeting she went on and on about how the industry makes a few rappers famous and they’re disgusting and misogynist, while the really great rappers are people you’ve never heard of, and they have too much integrity to to the things that would get themselves commercially exploited, and they speak truth to power. My eyes grew wider with wonder, and when she paused I exclaimed, “It’s just like the composing business!”

UPDATE 2: From Wikipedia’s Barbershop Harmony entry: “BHS arrangers believe that a song should contain dominant seventh chords anywhere from 35 to 60 percent of the time (measured as a percentage of the duration of the song rather than a percentage of the chords present) to sound ‘barbershop’.”

It also brings to mind one of my favorite Marx Brothers jokes, which comes at the beginning of Monkey Business before the Marx brothers even appear:

Sailor: Captain, we’ve got four stowaways on board, but we can’t find them.

Captain: If you can’t find them, how do you know there are four?

Sailor: They were singing “Sweet Adeline.”

 

 

My life has been sedentary and uneventful of late, but that’s about to change. In the month two weeks beginning next week I give nine seven lectures in locations across the nation. First I head for the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where I’ve already had such happy times, to teach classes on the Concord Sonata, microtonality, and such. I will also give my lecture “Thoreau’s Flute and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata” at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 West 10th Street, at 6:30 on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 19. Then I’ll teach some Friday classes at Missouri Western State University where my minimalist co-conspirator David McIntire teaches, and on February 21 at 7 I’ll give a pre-concert lecture about the Concord Sonata prior to Robert Pherigo’s performance of it at that school. (My dog Gita’s face made it onto the poster at right.)

The following week, weather permitting, I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the Beyond Microtonal Music Festival at the University of Pittsburgh. On Saturday afternoon, February 28, I’m giving a talk on my microtonal composing techniques that currently bears the working title, “How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass.” I’m trying to come up with a more polite official title, but drawing a blank. The next evening at the Andy Warhol Museum, Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray will give the world premiere of my Romance Postmoderne (though you’ve heard it here before). I’ve also been asked to give a talk on La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, though I don’t see yet that on the schedule.

I then get a week’s respite, and on March 11 I’ll be presenting the Geiringer Musicology Lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara; my bold-yet-qualified title is “How Ives Composed (in at Least a Few Instances),” this time actually mainly about the First Sonata, and I’m giving another lecture as well. I’ll give you final information for all that later. Oops – this event has now been postponed until next October. My fault for posting during Mercury retrograde.

I then spend a summer on my screened-in porch smoking and drinking more than is good for me, and the following September is really exciting. From September 8 to 13 in Bari in southern Italy, pianist and American music crusader Emanuele Arciuli, courtesy of the Bari Conservatory where he teaches, is throwing a Totalism festival, of all things, at the Teatro Petruzzelli (pictured), featuring music by me, Bernadette Speach, Mary Jane Leach, John Luther Adams, Lois Vierk, Evan Ziporyn, Eve Beglarian, Larry Polansky, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon. My Transcendental Sonnets for chorus and orchestra will get its European premiere, and Bernadette’s Embrace the Universe, for the same forces, its world premiere. What a fantastic week that sounds like! I told Emanuele it looks like I programmed the music myself. And two weeks later, Sept. 24-26, comes the Fifth Annual International Conference on Minimalist Music in Helsinki, for which I am the guest composer and also probably submitting a paper on Elodie Lauten. I’m trying to figure out reasons to stay in Europe from Sept. 14 to 23, if any of my European friends are reading. After a few slow years everything’s about to speed up again.

 

I was saddened this morning to hear from Mathew Rosenblum of the death, at age 87, of microtonal patriarch Ezra Sims. He was the pioneer of a 72edo (72 equal divisions of the octave) notation that spread among his younger colleagues in Boston and gave that city its own microtuning culture distinct from the rest of the nation. I only met him once, briefly at a Dinosaur Annex concert, but I respected his music from the first time I reviewed it in Fanfare, and we shared some jovial correspondence surrounding some liner notes I once wrote for him a 2011 profile I wrote of him for Chamber Music magazine.* His music was variously capable of gnarliness, wit, and soulfulness; for the second of these, I think of his choral setting of the epigram, “There is no need / Of Andre Gide.” And of course he entered theory-class anecdotal history when Baker’s Biographical Dictionary erroneously listed him as having written a String Quartet No. 2 in 1962, and he retroactively corrected the error in 1974 by writing a quintet for winds and strings and titling it “String Quartet No. 2 (1962).” As sometimes happens, he was clearly charming beneath a curmudgeonly reputation.

I found Sims’s microtonal notation a little counterintuitive: I once inherited a composition student from him, and could never keep track of which accidentals were which. But I notice from a statement on his own web site that his interests in the harmonic series were actually pretty similar to mine:

 Since 1961, most of what that Ive done all my major pieces that haven’t been tape music has been microtonal. At first, it was ¼-tone, but from 1964 it has been 72-note, using at any moment one transposition or another of an asymmetrical mode of 18 or 24 pitches drawn from a 72-note division of the octave, much as Tonal music used a 7-note mode drawn from a 12-note chromatic. The mode consist of a 8 pitches of superior importance, the 8-15th harmonics of the tonic of the moment, plus 10 (or 16) chromatic pitches also drawn from its harmonic series. The 72-note division permits an all-but-exact description of the sequialteran succession of Just ratios making up the mode (25/24–30/24 [or in the alternate version: 33/32 –5/4] followed by 21/16–31/16), while retaining the conceptual and modulatory convenience of a closed cyclic notation. I trust the performers naturally to play as near Just perfection as their musicality permits, but sometimes it helps to remind them.

I suppose one could say that, aside from Harry Partch in the beginning, three seminal microtonalists seem to have determined the nature and direction of microtonal culture in the U.S.: Erv Wilson on the West Coast, Ben Johnston in the Midwest, and Ezra Sims on the East Coast.

*UPDATE: I remembered he had sent me scores of all the works on this then-most-recent CD, which is what often happens with liner notes. And since that profile isn’t online, I attach it below as a tribute:

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American Composer: Ezra Sims
By Kyle Gann

Ezra Sims is probably best known, even among those who haven’t heard a note of his music, for his wry response to a musicological misprint in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the ‘60s that edifying tome, then edited by Nicolas Slonimsky, attributed to Sims a work he hadn’t written, a String Quartet No. 2 dated 1962. In 1974 Sims gallantly agreed to ameliorate Slonimsky’s embarrassment to the extent that he could by writing a piece entitled String Quartet No. 2 (1962) – scored for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello. As Sims notes, a title is not necessarily a description, and he cites as precedent the White Knight in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, whose song was called “Haddock’s Eyes” even though its title was “The Aged Aged Man,” etc. The score is dedicated to Slonimsky, “that he (or rather Baker’s) may now be less in error.”

This classic and oft-noted absurdity is far from the only bit of humor in Sims’s output; he has a piano piece charmingly called Grave Dance, and a song cycle titled Brief Glimpses into Contemporary French Literature whose recurring refrain is “There is no need of Andre Gide.” But for some of us Sims (www.ezrasims.com) is less important for the dry wit threaded through his work than for his status as one of the leading composers (along with Ben Johnston) of microtonal music for traditional acoustic instruments. More specifically, Sims is the doyen of a Boston-based microtonal world in which 72 equally-spaced pitches per octave is virtually the official lingua franca. Since 1964 Sims has written in his own notation which inflects pitches upward or downward by a 12th-tone, a 6th-tone, or a quarter-tone, and the local microtonalists (James Dalton being the one exception I know of) all seem to swear by the same notation.

The advantage of 72 tones per octave (or as it’s known among the cognoscenti, 72tet – 72-tone equal temperament) is that it renders close approximations to some of the lower but still more exotic overtones not in common use. (Please excuse the theory for the moment, we’ll resume practicality next paragraph.) A cent is defined as one 1200th of an octave, and with a new pitch every 17 cents one can achieve pretty clean 7th, 11th, and 13th harmonics. In fact, despite his equal-step grid Sims makes it clear that overtones are what he’s generally aiming for. At least in most works, he typically selects notes from the 72 possible to form an 18-note scale based on the 16th through 32nd harmonics, with a few “tendency tones” to fill it out. The varied transpositions of this18-note scale ultimately necessitate all 72 pitches.

The advantage of the 72-tone system with its mere three extra accidentals, as the Bostonians love lecturing the rest of us, is its practicality for live performance (as opposed to Johnston’s notation with its open-ended accidental system and difficult-to-find perfect consonances). Every sixth pitch is a familiar one on the piano, and the rest can be interpolated via a regular system that requires little explanation. As a result Sims’s output consists primarily of chamber music, and he has a special penchant for combining winds and strings, and playing the strings and winds off against each other. Like his String Quartet No. 2 (1962), Musing and Reminiscence (2003) and Landscapes (2008) reprise the two-wind/three-string combination; his Sextet of 1981 is scored for clarinet, alto sax, horn, and three strings; Night Piece (1989) is for flute, clarinet, viola, and cello with a background computer tape; and there’s a Flute Quartet (1982) and Clarinet Quintet (1987). Sims also has some delightful piano music and choral music using only the usual 12 pitches (12tet), and some orchestral work, but it’s the small wind-and-string groups in which he brews his microtonal aesthetic.

And a well-focused aesthetic it is. Sims tends to start off with a close set of pitches, often in repeated notes or in tremolo, whose evolution into wider and more complex harmonies evolves in accelerando. His music’s journey is always linear and easily followed by the ear – a wise thing, given the wild unfamiliarity of the ground he likes to cover. For some reason that psychologists will have to explain some day, composers who love splitting the half-step also love applying the same mathematics to rhythm, and Sims (much like Johnston) is fond of suggesting different tempos running at the same time. Quintuplets are everywhere, as well as fours-in-the-space-of-five. Tempos of fast movements run extremely fast, slow movements can be almost stationary. Between the 72 pitches and the phasing rhythms, it looks like extremely difficult music to play, but the types of difficulty are closely limited. So consistent is Sims’s language that I imagine once you learn to play one piece well, the others come much more easily.

For the listener, it’s a walk on the wild side indeed. The music is a pulsing, shifting continuum, dotted all round with contrapuntal echoes that maximize the tuning’s oddities. Yet if conventional moorings fall by the wayside, the music nevertheless projects a sense of restraint and logic. The microtonality comes off as exotic, yet the music’s linear motion and motivic cohesiveness keep the ear engaged. Music and Reminiscence opens with a series of parallel almost-fifths between the flute and clarinet, slightly changing in size. The first movement of Night Peace closes with a long, fluctuating drone on a wide tritone of 633 cents – bet you’ve never gotten to savor that ambiguity before. The music throbs, churns, dances, hibernates through pitch complexes you’ve never heard before, and the rhythm – though you’d rarely be able to identify a meter or locate a downbeat – has a pulse-based naturalness to it.

As with so much music that fascinates me, I regret having to describe Sims’s so technically. But it’s thoroughly abstract, with no programmatic associations, no typical musical forms, little melody in the traditional sense, no clear relation to minimalism or serialism or New Romanticism or heavy metal or polka or anything else. It’s just a unique brand of musical experience, and the only alternative to hearing it is describing how it’s made in hopes that you can imagine from that. And as Boston’s young microtonalists seep out across the rest of the country from the East Coast, the sense of Sims’s seminal influence is going national. He’s been one of our most original undergound musical legends for decades, and the mystery has built up too much pressure to keep quiet any longer. The good jokes he’s gotten off in his career are merely foils for realizing how serious and unprecedented his music is.

I’m snowed in, and statistically speaking, you probably are too. So let’s blog some of my Ives book, and I’ll give you my complete analysis of the Alcotts movement. I’ve already written about Ives’s mysterious references to Lizzy Alcott’s piano, and I won’t repeat that section here. At issue is which parts of the movement were meant to bring to mind Louisa May Alcott and her famous novels for children, and which her fecklessly philosophical father, Bronson Alcott. You’ll need to know a couple of things from earlier in the book to follow the analysis below. One is that the keys of E-flat and A are paired as oppositional tonalities throughout the Concord Sonata, in all four movements. The other is that Ives used a kind of source chord for the entire sonata, consisting of four, five, or six notes of a whole-tone scale along with one note from the opposing whole-tone scale. I call it the “whole-tone-plus-one” collection.

Now, one of my anonymous external readers insisted that I add some “theoretical commentary” about the whole-tone scale, what its properties are. Let that sink in a moment: the whole-tone scale is one that every college music major knows, and its properties are very simple and pretty limited. It’s all whole steps! Nevertheless, I had already written five pages about what the whole-tone scale would have meant to a musician of Ives’s generation, relating it to Helmholtz and the harmonic series, quoting Henry Cowell’s view of it, conceptualizing it in terms of Pythagorean tuning (which was an explicit interest of Ives’s), and talking about its implications for jazz chords in terms of sharp 11, flat 13, and so on. And that wasn’t enough! I was supposed to write more about it! How many of you reading this could write more than five pages about the properties of the whole-tone scale – not its use in specific pieces, but its properties? And assuming you’re already capable of reading a book of musical analysis, how much would you need of that in order to understand a whole-tone reference?

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…Ives’s view… that Bronson Alcott might be more kindly remembered if the dictagraph had been invented decades earlier (allowing him to record his extempore verbal flights), is an opinion with a long tradition behind and ahead of it. Ives takes Alcott’s reputation on faith, calling him “an exuberant, irrepressible visionary” with “[a]n internal grandiloquence [that] made him melodious without [p. 45].” He is more condescending to the family’s more famous daughter: “Miss Alcott is fond of working her story around so that she can better rub in a moral precept – and the moral sometimes browbeats the story [p. 46].” Though he attributes a didactic streak to both, he emphasizes their differences: “The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype – she seems to have but few of her father’s qualities ‘in female’ [p. 46].” Ives also signals his intention not to depict either individually. “We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of Bronson Alcott,” he writes,

and so we won’t try to reconcile the music sketch of the Alcotts with much besides the memory of that home under the elms—the Scotch songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day—though there may be an attempt to catch something of that common sentiment… – a strength of hope that never gives way to despair – a conviction in the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done, may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its transcendentalists. [p. 48]

Elsewhere in the Memos, however, he mentions that the music tries to suggest the tales, incidents, and characteristics of the authors, and that “the Alcott piece tries to catch something of old man Alcott’s – the great talker’s – sonorous thought.”15

All this raises a question for the listener to The Alcotts, for all of its relative simplicity. Much of the movement is gentle and idyllic, but not all of it. Two passages in particular seem rife with struggle: the dissonant, crescendoing play of the Beethoven’s Fifth motives on p. 54, and the whole-tone flavored approach to the triumphant “human faith” theme on p. 57. It is tempting, of course, to fall back on gender stereotypes and link the calm, more tonal sections to Louisa May’s children’s books, and the more agitated struggle to Bronson’s “philosophical raptures” and “sonorous thought.” But Ives throws a wrench into that argument in the Memos, where he likens the bitonal key signatures of the opening to his fantasy that “old man Alcott likes to talk in Ab, and Sam Staples likes to have his say over the fence in Bb”16 – Sam Staples being the Concord constable who once threw Thoreau (and, earlier, almost threw Alcott) in jail for conscientiously refusing to pay the poll tax, and a later source of anecdotes about Thoreau, Alcott, and others. (No discredit accrues to Staples, who offered to pay Thoreau’s tax himself if Thoreau would let him.17) So the gentle first page, in Ives’s mind, seems connected to Bronson Alcott’s famed serenity. In addition, the stormier second page quotes the Beethoven’s Fifth motive liberally, and Ives talks of Louisa May’s little sister Beth “playing at” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Should we, therefore, reverse gender roles here? Louisa May was after all the practical member of the family, the one who went to work, published salacious stories under a pen name, and, with Little Women and its successors, secured a comfortable old age for her feckless father and his long-suffering wife. Along with her mother, she seems to have been the fiery one in the family. Louisa May/Jo’s struggle to control her temper is one of the major themes of Little Women. Sophia Peabody, who lived for awhile with the Alcotts, adored their restful companionship, with the single exception of Louisa May: “Her force makes me retreat sometimes from an encounter,” she wrote with a shudder.18 Could the quiet opening represent Bronson’s calm talk of the spiritual immensities, and the gathering storm Louisa May’s untamable fury, or her steely determination to raise her family out of a poverty that was not always genteel? Or do we more obviously relate the domestic, parlor-song quality of the middle section to Little Women, and think of the jagged, irregular dissonances as the attempt to express the ineffable relation of Spirit to Matter? Can we do both at once? Could Ives, limited as his view of Louisa May probably was to the children’s books, have sensed her darker side, or is to think so an anachronism of our post-feminist vantage point? Ives leaves us to imagine the entire movement as an idyllic life under the elms, infused at times with “a strength of hope that never gives way to despair,” but, certainly, the music circumscribes a dichotomy more violent than this suggests.

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The Alcotts movement is primarily concerned with the Human Faith theme, and also with the related Missionary Chant hymn; indeed, it is only this movement that requires us to take notice of the Missionary Chant at all. Ex. 9-1 gives the music in full.

Ex. 9.1 Missionary Chant

What we want to particularly notice are the motives of a repeated note followed by a falling major third that open each half of the verse, in slightly different rhythmic configurations.

The Alcotts movement is something of a clear ABA form, and its harmonic structure is, by Ivesian standards, remarkably simple as well. Within the first A section, after two brief phrases each based on the Missionary Chant, the Human Faith theme is repeated no fewer than three times, all three of them in the key of B-flat: at syss. 53-2/3, from syss. 53-4, m. 2 to 54-1, and from syss. 55-1, beat 7, through the first measure of 55-3. All of these employ both halves of the theme, though in the first some notes are altered or omitted, and the second veers off in the middle of the second half for an extended passage of development. At the final measure of sys. 55-3 begins an unmistakable, calmer and more conventional B section in a kind of American parlor-music style, which is itself repeated. The final A section, for which we can choose sys. 56-5 as a reasonable starting point, plays around with motives from the Human Faith theme for four systems, leading to a climactic statement of the entire theme in the key of C. As we’ve noted before, this is the theme’s most complete and defining statement in the entire sonata.

The Alcotts opens with the most conventional chord progression we’ve yet heard in the piece: I vi IV ii V I, pure and simple and logical, in the key of B-flat. The first eight notes of the melody outline the hymn Missionary Chant, except that the drop of a major third occurs between the third and fourth notes instead of the fourth and fifth – meaning that a Beethoven’s Fifth quote is included as well; in fact, Ives switches around the openings of the Missionary Chant’s two phrases, using D-D-D-Bb first and then D-D-D-D-Bb, instead of the other way around. And the odd little melodic flourish at the end of the phrase seems to be a Human Faith motive in retrograde, with the perfect fifth replaced by a perfect fourth (Ex. 9.2).

Ex. 9.2 Sys. 53-1, first half

The phrase repeats, and this time the melody follows the opening of the Missionary Chant rather than Beethoven’s Fifth. The harmony, however, goes to the subdominant, Eb, rather than the vi chord, which is natural enough; but then the Eb is followed by a chord that doesn’t fit in Bb major at all, A minor (Ex. 9.3).

Ex. 9.3 Sys. 53-1, second half

And so, as the Missionary Chant flows blissfully overhead, Ives has reintroduced our Eb-A opposition. The root movement goes a tritone from Eb to A, a logical fourth from A to D, up to the dominant of Bb, only to land unexpectedly on Ab major, a whole-step below our implied Bb cadence. Ives has packed a lot of meaning into the eighteen beats of this seemingly simple first line, and he is soon going to unpack it.

As mentioned in Chapter 6, we have a recording of Ives playing The Alcotts in its entirety from April 24, 1943, and we learn from it several things about his playing. One is that his hands weren’t unusually large. I have fairly large hands myself, but I can’t play that open bass triad Ab-Eb-C with my left hand without having to roll it, making the major tenth from a black key to a white; Ives couldn’t either. When he can’t split the notes between both hands, he rolls that chord. Nor does Ives always follow his own notation; in the example above, where the two D’s are tied together in the melody, Ives doesn’t play them tied, but reiterates the D over the F dominant chord.

At this point the music does something fairly radical for its time, notationally, at least. For the first time in the sonata a key signature appears, and in fact, two appear at once: Bb (two flats) in the treble staff and Ab (four flats) in the bass staff. The Human Faith theme now appears in B-flat. As mentioned before, Ives referred to this passage as Bronson Alcott talking in Ab, Sam Staples in Bb; it is curious that, of the two, the town sheriff has the Human Faith theme while the philosopher merely strums his Ab-major triads. A manuscript (f3979) shows that Ives had initially written the entire theme within the treble clef over the Ab chords, but he later took it up an octave. The theme is also incomplete; a phrase is partly missing, though Ives supplied some of the notes in a lower octave (Ex. 9.4).

Ex. 9.4 Comparison of sys. 53-2 with the Human Faith theme
We also notice how colored this page is by the interval of a major ninth. There are several major ninths in this passage with either an internal perfect fourth, tritone, or perfect fifth added from the upper or lower note, and in sys. 53-3 the music pauses for a pair of “shadow” chords outside the key: A-F#-B and F#-E-G#. The next phrase seems to be an altered Human Faith motto altered by an octave displacement on the F (Ex. 9.5),

Ex. 9.5 Human Faith motto embedded in sys. 53-3

and its successor is a similar motto in retrograde, patterned after the ones in the first system (Ex. 9.6).

Ex. 9.6 Retrograde Human Faith motto at sys. 53-4

Whether we are switching from Louisa May to Bronson or vice versa, the atmosphere now changes sharply. In the middle of sys. 53-4 the Human Faith theme in B-flat then starts up again, this time with a left-hand line that accompanies it bitonally through several keys, first D major, then B major (or E major if you count the A-natural), ending up on our afore-mentioned A minor (Ex. 9.7 – in the next few examples I will be rewriting Ives’s accidentals and sometimes durations to make the musical logic clearer, so I refer the reader to the original score for a more authentic reading).

Ex. 9.7 Syss. 53-4 to 54-1

Following the progression from the first half of Human Faith to the second, this leads to a rather startlingly naked Beethoven’s Fifth motive, D-D-D-Bb. Instead of leading to the alleged Hammerklavier quotation, though, its consequent is a motive on the Missionary Chant, with the fourth and fifth notes quickened into 8th-notes (Ex. 9.8).

Ex. 9.8 Sys. 54-1, combining Beethoven’s Fifth motive and Missionary Chant contour

This form of what we will now call the Missionary Chant motive becomes the basis of the development that leads us away from the second half of our Human Faith theme.

This next section is a sharp departure from the serenity of the movement so far towards anxiety and irregularity. The first Missionary Chant motive is followed by another Beethoven’s Fifth motive pounded in the Beethovenian key of C minor, which at first appears as a ii chord in this B-flat context, and then another Missionary Chant motive in the same key. This next increasingly tense passage will also end in C minor, so that what comes in-between serves functionally as what Schenkerians might call a prolongation, but a bitonal one. We see the bass echo the beginning of the movement by leading from Ab up a tritone to D, and then up a fifth to A, where we hit a chord that unexpectedly suggests A major (Ex. 9.9: once again, I alter many of Ives’s enharmonic spellings for clarity).

Ex. 9.9 Syss. 54-1/3

The subsequent Missionary Chant motive seems to outline Db major resolving to something like C major in the right hand, as the left hand plays pitches from G major, also moving to C. The next Missionary Chant motive resumes bitonality, with the upper chord rooted on C#/Db and the lower one on B, almost as though the C minor were going out of focus and blurring a half-step in both directions. The final Missionary Chant motive, altered in contour, again suggests tonalities a whole-step apart, Bb above C, and leading to a chord, the momentary climax of this progression, which contains an entire whole-tone scale plus one other note – Eb-F-G-A-B-Db and Bb – our “nature” chord from Emerson. (The chords on either side, E-C-Ab-Db-Bb, are subsets of this chord as well.) From here, the voice-leading moves chromatically upward to another Beethoven’s Fifth motive, and we find ourselves back in unassailable C minor.

Two more statements of the Beethoven’s Fifth motive are marked by an “overtone” note, a high D dissonant with the main chord (although in his 1943 recording Ives clearly plays consonant G’s both times); such notes will recur as a feature of the movement. The subsequent dissolution of this motive is one of the most theoretically revealing passages in the entire sonata. System 54-4 is remarkable for containing only seven pitches grouped in three triads: C minor in the treble and bass and an alternation between A minor and Eb minor in the middle register (Ex. 9.10).

Ex. 9.10 Sys. 54-4

Of course, these triads separated by minor thirds render seven pitches of an octatonic scale – Eb E Gb G A Bb C – and the inner chords are our familiar Eb/A opposition, now contained within a firm C minor, the clearest possible statement of one part of Ives’s overall harmonic conception. Even more remarkable is how Ives, limiting himself to just these three chords and with a new attack on every single 8th-note, manages a stirring rhythmic acceleration by progressively shortening the repetition patterns. The C’s in the bass grow shorter in duration in an 8th-note pattern of 6-5-4-3-3, and the pairings of A and Eb decrease as 7-5-5-3-3-2, with the treble C-minor chords accelerating and then slowing down again, a quite audible effect. The underlying logic also makes the passage easy to memorize, even if the pianist isn’t consciously aware of it.

The explosion to which this process leads is full of resonance for the Missionary Chant. This time, though, it is not the hymn’s first phrase, but its third that is referred to almost subliminally, not only in its rhythm but its dropping down by thirds (Ex. 9.11), which Ives cleverly augments by one last third (G-Eb-C-A-natural) where the hymn ends with only a major second (C-Ab-F-Eb).

Ex. 9.11 Comparison of Missionary Chant with sys. 55-1

The figure pulls us back into the key of B-flat by a relatively conventional, if colorful, harmonic progression (i-VI-V/VII in the key of C, the V/VII pivoting to V of Bb), retroactively reinterpreting the C minor once again as ii of B-flat. The example is significant for illustrating the way Ives sometimes (especially in his songs, but also abundantly elsewhere) refers to musical materials that are outside the work and only incompletely instantiated within it. One need not know the Missionary Chant to understand The Alcotts: the movement makes musical sense without it. But if the opening variations on the hymn’s falling major third do bring it to mind, this veiled allusion to the complete third phrase acts as almost unconscious confirmation that the tune is in Ives’s mind, even if the music never presents the hymn in toto. On some level the music’s meaning finds completion in music that exists external to the sonata, shared in Ives’s and the listener’s memory.

The Human Faith theme makes a grand appearance next, but a recessive one, dimenuendoing away from a climax rather than building toward one. The harmonization is fairly standard, by Ivesian criteria, but it is worth noting some lovely internal imitative counterpoint, such as this unusual imitation at the lower seventh (Ex. 9.12),

Ex. 9.12 Imitation at sys. 55-1

and also a great deal of textural originality, along with some downward chromatic voice-leading that makes the huge, ripped chords seem to melt (Ex. 9.13).

Ex. 9.13 Sys. 55-2

The second half of Human Faith takes place more quietly in virtual 5/8 meter. The theme in the right hand is in standard B-flat major; this is rendered mysterious by the left hand, which is entirely in a whole-tone scale plus an added C# – in other words, another appearance of our whole-tone-plus-one source pitch set (Ex. 9.14).

Ex. 9.14 Sys. 55-2

And the section closes on an expectant Bb dominant seventh with a quiet F# echoing above. We quoted this recurring chord in chapter 3 as a highlighted example of a whole-tone chord plus a perfect fifth.
The B section that begins at the second measure of sys. 55-3 is pure parlor song material, though with the occasional ironic chromatic Ivesianism. This is clearly what Ives refers to as Beth playing the Scottish folk songs – the tune even includes an instance of the so-called “Scotch snap,” an accented 16th-note followed by a dotted 8th. The key is Eb, the subdominant of the movement’s prevailing Bb, a relationship typical of 19th-century classical ABA forms in general and 19th-century sentimental songs alike. Like so many celtic folk songs, the tune is in a kind of gapped pentatonic scale, Eb-F-G-Bb-C, with many motives of a second followed by a third in the same direction, or vice versa. This is true of the Human Faith theme as well, and in fact, in their entirety the two themes share the same pitch set, a diatonic scale missing the leading tone. Since the Human Faith theme starts high and comes downward, and the B theme here does the opposite, it seems possible (in the manner of so many classical composers) that Ives derived the new theme from some form of the old one, in this case the retrograde (Ex. 9.15).

Ex. 9.15 Middle section theme compared to Human Faith theme retrograde

To assert this abstract relationship, though, seems hardly necessary; the new melody fits programmatically and is closely related to Human Faith in intervallic style. Why the theme ends with an unmistakable evocation of the famous-to-the-point-of-hackneyed wedding march from Lohengrin presents a small mystery, though perhaps Ives was simply making a reference to comfortable domesticity, or to the fact that every 19th-century sentimental novel culminates in a wedding.
What’s more interesting is the way Ives’s own 1943 performance of The Alcotts deviates from the notation. Both times the end of this phrase comes up, in the 6/4 measure where he appends the direction “hold back a little,” Ives himself doesn’t hold back at all, but, as Ex. 9.16 shows, rather doubles the tempo of the fourth and fifth beats.

Ex. 9.16 Comparison of Ives 1943 recording to sys. 55-4

It seems to me the pianist, if he or she so chooses, is fully justified in choosing the second option, which Ives voted for with his hands in 1943, even if he voted another way with the notes in 1920 and 1947.

The B phrase of this little internal ABAB form is in the dominant of the B section, Bb. Musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock has noted that the first six beats are identical to the first measure and a half of an old minstrel song, published in 1847, variously called “Stop Dat Knocking” or “Stop that Knocking at My Door” (Ex. 9.17), by Anthony F. Winnemore, who led a minstrel group called the Band of Virginia Serenaders.27

Ex. 9.17 “Stop Dat Knocking at My Door”

This italianate melody is itself a parody of Italian opera style28, and similar phrases abound in the classical literature. More essentially, its motive of a lower neighbor note leading to a rising scale becomes the generative germ of the lead-in to the final A section, recurring from syss. 56-4 to 57-3.

At the upbeat to m. 3 in sys. 56-4 the rising scale motive runs into a Human Faith motto, and Ives begins reintroducing dissonances. I have referred to The Alcotts, as everyone does, as an ABA form, but what Ives does here is more nuanced and complex than that implies. At sys. 56-5 the music cadences momentarily on a Bb triad, which can conveniently be taken as the beginning of the second A section. But actually, the Human Faith motto is hinted at before this (sys. 56-4, mm. 2-3), as the B-section melody continues being referred to after it. The first section A and section B are clearly articulated from each other, but the B blurs back into the second A via an interestingly gradual process, and the stage-by-stage progression back to the full Human Faith melody is in Ives’s best cumulative form manner.
In the right hand of sys. 56-5 Ives continues the B-section material with a pentatonic scale graced with chromatic lower neighbor notes (and a final Scotch snap); the left hand begins wandering up and down a whole-tone scale on Bb with an F added (Ex. 9.18).

Ex. 9.18 Sys. 56-5

In the next system all of the notes, up until the “human faith” motto in Eb at the end, are within a whole-tone scale on D with a C# added (Ex. 9.19).

Ex. 9.19 Sys. 57-1

If any doubt remained that Ives was thinking of a pitch set containing a whole-tone scale plus one additional pitch, it is surely dispelled here.

In syss. 57-2 and the first half of 57-3 the music is grounded on an Eb drone, as the left hand wanders around a whole-tone scale on D, and the right hand plays with the Human Faith motto in what could be taken as an incomplete octatonic scale: Eb-(E)-F#-G-A-Bb-C-(Db). In the middle of sys. 57-3 this relatively lengthy dominant preparation on Eb bursts into an A major triad, giving us one last taste of our Eb/A opposition. The music shifts uneasily between A-major and Bb-major triads, as the do-re-mi motives above create an elegant logic for the shift away from Bb, twice playing G-A-B, Bb-C-D, and then continuing G-A-B-C-D-E (Ex. 9.20).

Ex. 9.20 Sys. 57-3, right hand

as the sonata finally bursts into its grandest statement of the Human Faith theme in its entirety, in bold, exuberant C major. The number of notes per chord, the simultaneous bass line, tenor chords, and treble melody with internal clusters and added grace notes, create a feeling that the music is trying to transcend the keyboard, bursting the bounds of what the piano is capable of. The failure of the instrument and the fingers to do justice to the emotion is almost palpable, rendering the emotion all the more affecting. Significantly, when Henry Brant orchestrated this part of the Concord (in A Concord Symphony, which will be discussed in Chapter 14), he wisely played down this passage and made it softer (marked f molto cantabile), for what sounds heroic on the keyboard would have produced only bombast in the orchestra.

Though it looks simpler than some of the others, one chord, marked with an asterisk in Ex. 9.21, has always struck me as problematic.

Ex. 9.21 Sys. 57-5

The upper nine notes that follow the grace-note octave in the bass cannot be played all at once by two hands of reasonable size. If Ives seriously wanted all those notes, the chord must be rolled, like its predecessor; and in fact, it is marked with a wavy roll line all the way up in the 1920 score, which he omitted in 1947. Is the top note supposed to be struck with the left hand, as so often in Ives’s gargantuan chords? This is not how he plays it in 1943; there is some rolling, but the top several notes are simultaneous with their chords. The temptation to leave out either the bottom G or the middle B is very great, but one tries to be faithful to the score, knowing that with Ives one must frequently finesse the rhythm and texture to get all the notes in. [Of the 42 recordings I own, 24 roll that chord; the rest presumably either omit a note or have very large hands.]

One essential feature of the Human Faith theme is that is doesn’t quite end – every single statement of it in the sonata, except this one, is a kind of a question disappearing into the ether. In this one case, though, Ives comes up with a true ending, and his solution is brilliant. He resumes the theme with a recap of its first seven notes but continuing down the scale to a Bb, over a left-hand harmony that has suddenly dropped down from C to Bb, just as in the beginning of the movement the harmony drops from Bb to Ab. For someone who is so often chary of dynamic markings, Ives throws in a humorous surfeit of them here, just where a sensitive performer least needs them as a guide (Ex. 9.22).

Ex. 9.22 Ending of the Human Faith theme in The Alcotts

As mentioned in chapter 3, the music feints towards Bb for a moment and seems about to end there, where it began, but then resolves, with a minor-seventh drop in the melody, onto one of the most comforting, reassuring, even heart-breaking C-major triads in the history of music. Oddly enough, and flagrantly contradicting his “slower” indication, Ives in his 1943 recording speeds up for this little coda, as though too reticent to draw from it all the pathos of which it is capable.

A side note: in a manuscript of the Alcotts movement (f3986 to f3991), all of the little “overtone” notes through the entire movement that ring dissonantly in the top register are F#’s except for the two high D’s in sys. 54-3. Ives toyed with the idea of inserting six such pianissimo F#’s during the final “human faith” statement. Ex. 9.23 shows a sketch from f3991, in which one can see a high F# marked pp just after a 16th-note rest above the fourth chord, and another one, crossed out, following the last chord of the phrase.

Ex. 9.23 F# overtones in f3991

There is even one above the movement’s final chord, marked ppp. Except for perhaps this last, which I rather like, Ives was right to ultimately decide against these; they would have been a quirky distraction from the grand statement he makes here. But that he considered inserting them (and they also are reinserted into a revision on the 1920 score at f4142) says something about his large-scale sense of harmony, and confirms a vague impression I sometimes get that F# is a special pitch in the Concord, saved primarily for the long statement of Martyn in Hawthorne, and otherwise rarely emphasized structurally but sometimes hovering in the background.

 

[15] Ives, Memos, p. 191.

[16] Ives, Memos, p. 191.

[17] Edward Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, p. 64.

[18] Sophia Peabody to Mrs. William Russell, July 25, 1836; quoted in Bedell, The Alcotts: Biography of a Family, p. 125.

………

[27] H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction, p. 167. Gayle Sherwood Magee speculates that the use of “Stop Dat Knocking” might be in ironic response to the “Fate knocking at the door” of the Beethoven’s Fifth motive; certainly a wry joke on Ives’s part if true. See Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, p. 135.

[28] Robert B. Winans, liner notes to The Early Minstrel Show, New World Records 80338.